XML/Python: RSS Not Looking Too Bad Anymore

XML on the web has failed by Mark Pilgrim. I discovered this when I found out one of my webhosts used a different encoding from the pages I was producing. He writes:

if the media type given in the Content-Type HTTP header is text/xml, text/xml-external-parsed-entity, or a subtype like text/AnythingAtAll+xml, then the encoding attribute of the XML declaration within the document is ignored completely, and the character encoding is:
1. the encoding given in the charset parameter of the Content-Type HTTP header, or
2. us-ascii.

I just noticed that Oreilly’s Safari offers online books by other publishers. At 19.99$ it’s still not in the affordable range (although ebook readers could help a lot with this), but it’s getting a lot closer.

Recently I’ve taken a second look at rss readers. I use the web version of bloglines. I’m still not completely sold on it except for podcasting and things like that, but here’s one way rss really shines: putting newsgroups and mailing lists on the web(as good as, if not better than google groups). Bloglines lets you “save” posts so that they’re constantly listed as new, serving as a kind of “bookmark function.” RSS really works well for sites updated infrequently (unlike weblogs for example). One cool thing about plone was that creating an RSS for any page required practically no effort at all.

Lorelle VanFossen writes about the new WordPress Documentation Codex. Interestingly, Plone is starting to adopt that look as well. I think in general a two column or three column list of starter topics tends to be a good home page, especially if the topic groupings stay static (the contents of these contents could be changed; that’s not what I’m talking about)

Kurt Cagle on the new XML Generation (and how the latest batch of programmers will be different in their perspectives and methods). Kurt Cagle writes the appropriately titled understandingxml.

Newsrooms need to redefine news and news gathering. They need to be open to new sources of news, including the reporting of the people they used to view as the audience: yes, even bloggers. To use our parlance today, newsrooms need to think of themselves — again — as aggregators, gathering — and sometimes packaging, sometimes not — the news their communities create.

They also need to waste less effort, talent, and money on commodity news, the news we already know, the news we could write ourselves if we watched CSpan or CNN. If you can link to it, if the audience already knows it, why spend ever-more-precious resources redoing it? Instead, it is better to concentrate on a newsroom’s real value, reporting: journalists’ ability to ask the questions people in power don’t want asked, to be an advocate for the public to power, to get to the bottom of debates, to add perspective, to be local. Journalists aren’t the only ones who can do that, but that is still their primary value.